Iraq War groups MIA on Syria

Since 2008, many advocacy organizations have shifted their focus from national security. | AP Photo

It remains to be seen if any other center-left groups will come out in support of Obama’s request for action in Syria. The liberal groups organized around the Iraq and Afghanistan wars would be unlikely to abandon their anti-war politics at Obama’s demand. Several of those outfits, such as the veteran-led VoteVets.org and the grassroots group MoveOn, announced their opposition to striking Syria on Wednesday.

The hawkish groups that existed back in 2008 were overwhelmingly on the right. As much as an attack on Assad’s Syria might be in line with the larger goals of foreign policy hawks, it’s not as if Obama has even partially embraced the broader agenda of 2008-vintage groups such as Freedom’s Watch.

Text Size

-

+

reset

The one obvious entity that could attempt to mobilize Democrats in favor of Syria intervention would be Obama’s own Organizing for America, strategists said. But the group has not taken an active role in the debate so far; several requests for comment by OFA were not returned.

As of mid-week, that left several major Jewish political organizations – including the Republican Jewish Coalition, the National Jewish Democratic Council and AIPAC – in what several strategists described as a lonely and uncomfortable position of endorsing military action against Syrian dictator Bashar Assad without much help from other advocacy-group allies.

In addition, the recently-launched Bipartisan Coalition for American Security, a foreign policy group helmed by hawkish former Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman and former GOP Sen. Scott Brown, said in a statement that Congress should authorize military action “that is punishing so that it does serious damage.”

BCAS, however, has not indicated that it aims to play heavily in elections. David Solimini, the vice president of the Democratic-aligned Truman National Security Project, said the Syria issue just doesn’t lend itself to straightforward electioneering in either direction.

“It’s really easy to be absolutists about the Iraq war. It’s really hard to be absolutists about Syria,” he said. Solimini added that it’s no surprise that many pro-war groups from the Iraq and Afghanistan era, which he dismissed as “astroturf” operations, have faded in the intervening years.

“A lot of the pro-war groups … were less about grassroots and more about D.C. Their issue goes away, their big funder dries up and they move on,” he said.

Still, it’s on the interventionist right where the shift in electioneering infrastructure is most noticeable, and where the lack of outside-group support may have the more serious consequences.

Republican and Democratic hawks are quick to note that the debate over Syria is an imperfect test of interventionist politics, more generally. Even lawmakers who intend to support military attacks in Syria have privately and publicly expressed dismay at the halting way the Obama administration has made its case for striking the Assad regime.

In the absence of a crystal-clear message from the White House about the need for military intervention and the goals of any action in Syria, strategists say it’s not clear that any amount of advocacy advertising could shift public opinion in favor of an attack.

“There are zero good options and so everybody’s scrambling,” said one leading GOP operative focused on foreign policy. “Nobody is passionate about giving the president the resolution, because it’s the least-bad of all the options. But there are no good options.”

American Enterprise Institute scholar Danielle Pletka laid the blame squarely at the White House’s doorstep: “I suppose that many people feel there is no point in fighting when the president is determined to lose.”